An Unexpected Gift
Haälbeck doors were really the most convenient thing ever created, Emily thought as she snuck out of a butter-yellow house that sat atop Nob Hill. There were only two of the magical portals in San Francisco, but since one terminated in the butter-yellow house—which was owned by the Institute—it had been the work of an instant to slip through it to San Francisco. And since Mrs. Quincy—the head of the Institute’s San Francisco office who’d once resided in the house—had been dismissed in disgrace over gambling debts and other sundry malfeasances, Emily didn’t have to worry much about being seen.
The Institute’s door in New York, which was kept in a lavishly appointed room on the mansion’s second floor, was customarily kept locked. But Stanton had shown her the secret of opening it on one of the rare, pleasant days they’d been able to spend together.
“You never know when it might come in handy,” Stanton had said as he pressed hot kisses beneath her left ear. At the time, their visit to the Haälbeck Room had more to do with its convenient seclusion than its employment for practical tutelage. But Stanton never could pass by an opportunity to be pedantic, and that did come in handy sometimes.
Emily pulled the battered old bowler down over her eyes, glad that her hair was still short enough to pass for a man’s. She had changed into a sack suit that she always kept hidden at the bottom of her trunk—she’d purchased it in New York when it had become obvious that people generally took exception to young ladies wandering around the streets on their own. Police officers could get downright huffy about it, so she’d adopted the ruse that had served her so well in the past. Disguised as a young man, she could move with ease and anonymity, and without every fool in the world thinking it necessary to fold down steps, open doors, or press her with annoying questions about what she was doing out alone.
It was still early in San Francisco, just after lunchtime, but the sky was heavy with overcast clouds and a choking smell like burning tar. Pausing at the top of Clay Street, she shaded her eyes and looked down over the city. She could see smoke rising from distant fires, and there was the sound of hand-cranked sirens and the occasional echoing pop of rifle shots.
Drawing a deep breath, she headed down Clay Street toward Market. Emily knew next to nothing about San Francisco, but she knew that if she could get to Market Street she could find Third Street, and if she could find Third Street she could find the Southern Pacific Depot. She stuffed her hands into her pockets and kept her head low, walking fast.
Getting to San Francisco had been the easy part; getting to Lost Pine would be harder. The little timber camp didn’t have a train station, much less a Haälbeck door, and it was almost 200 miles from San Francisco. But if she walked fast, she could make it to the depot in time to catch the evening east-bound. That would get her as far as Dutch Flat, which was less than twenty miles from Lost Pine; there she could rent a nag from one of the stables and be at Pap’s side by morning.
Walking through the streets, she was even more aware of the pronounced change in the atmosphere of the city. The streets were deserted, windows dark. Clusters of tired-looking soldiers in faded blue stood watchfully near crates of ammunition—marked “99% Pure Silver”—and shining pyramids of rifles, neatly stacked.
At Kearny Street, she came to a small park, shaded by tall maples and fenced with intricately wrought iron. Within the park, a huge bonfire was burning and stinking, sending billows of oily smoke into the already-overcast sky. Emily brought her sleeve to her nose against the horrible stench. They were burning dead Aberrancies. A half dozen military wagons were lined up along Kearny Street, each one piled high with the bodies of slimy black dead things—creatures that had once been ants, insects, earthworms. Someone’s pet cat—now the size of a rowboat—took up one whole wagon. It lay stiff and slimy, red eyes glazed and limbs twisted.
Under the watch of a small detachment of soldiers, strong men in black-streaked overalls leaned on shovels, grimly tending the unnaturally colored blaze; a few women with handkerchiefs over their mouths watched through narrowed eyes. The flames leapt and spat, tinged purple and blue and sulphur-yellow.
“Your folks know you’re out, son?” Emily jumped as a heavy hand fell on her shoulder. The words were spoken by a kind-looking older man with long gray whiskers, wearing a blue Army frock coat and sash. From the crossed swords on his slouched hat, she could tell he was a captain of the U.S. Cavalry, but his uniform didn’t bear the special insignia of one of the Army’s Warlock divisions. So much the better, Emily thought; she didn’t have much use for the Army’s Warlock divisions. She gave him what she hoped was a boyish grin.
“I’m on my way to the Southern Pacific Depot,” Emily said, then turned to continue down Clay Street, hoping to forestall further questioning.
“Well, you’re going the wrong way!”
Emily scratched the back of her head sheepishly. “I am?”
“Yep. Nothin’ down that way but Aberrancies. I wouldn’t take another step along Clay without a rifle and a couple hundred rounds of silver. Now, you carry on along Kearny until you get to Market Street. Cross Market to Third, then go right along until you hit Townsend.” He paused. “You gettin’ out of the city?”
Emily nodded. She’d learned, when inhabiting men’s clothing, that the success of her impersonation hinged upon speaking as little as possible.
“Well, good luck to you.” The old soldier shook his head. “The Warlocks in my division say it’s going to get worse before it gets better. You watch your step.”
Emily tipped her hat to him gratefully and turned down Kearny Street. It, too, had vastly changed since the last time she’d been there. Then it had been bustling with life and energy, horsecars and carriages and busy people hurrying to fascinating employments. The shop windows had been crammed with wares, and everything had rattled and gleamed. Now the street was deserted, save for the soldiers on every street corner, and devastation reigned. The windows were shuttered or boarded over; she was the only civilian pedestrian. She walked around an overturned wagon that had been smashed to flinders; the traces of black slime on the wood showed the author of its destruction.
As she was crossing Market Street, the earth rolled as if a great serpent were moving beneath it. She managed to make it across the street, tumbling against a telegraph pole for support, wrapping her good arm around it to keep herself upright. The macadam shifted and bucked, and a huge chunk of plaster ornament fell from a tall building nearby, carving a deep gash in the sidewalk, peppering her with sharp bits of rubble. She listened for the cracking sound she’d heard in her Cassandra, expecting next to smell the rotten stench of Black Exunge, but it did not come. That inevitability had been avoided. For now.
When the ground stopped moving and it seemed that all the head-splitting plaster that was going to fall had fallen, Emily hurried toward the depot. When she arrived there, she realized why all the streets had seemed deserted. Every man, woman, and child in San Francisco was here, milling around the station, surrounded by their belongings—trunks and suitcases, cardboard boxes tied with twine, cages with rabbits and chickens. And all of them wanted to go East.
Emily stared at the spectacle, heart sinking.
“You’ll never get a ticket.” The words, which came from her left, were like a physical manifestation of her own worried thoughts. “They’ve put on all the cars they have. Everything is sold out.”
The voice that spoke was tinged with a thick Russian accent. Emily turned, fixing the stranger with a distrustful gaze. It wasn’t fair, but she’d come to distrust Russian accents. But they were common enough in San Francisco, and this man was remarkable in his unremarkableness. A bland early fortyish, he was of such regular height and build he seemed to have been stamped from a machine. And he was unrelentingly brown—brown hair, a neatly trimmed brown mustache and goatee.
“Do I know you?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“No, but I believe I can intuit your difficulty. You wish to purchase a ticket. And you will not be able to do so.”
Emily frowned, but the man carried on.
“However, I have a solution to the dilemma you are not yet even aware of having. I have a single ticket, which is useless to me. Would you like to have it?”
Narrowing her eyes, Emily employed a phrase she’d just recently learned in New York.
“What’s the catch?”
The brown man blinked at her.
“What does it mean?” he asked. “Catch?”
“Why would you let me have your ticket?” She pointed to a well-fed gentleman with a gold watch chain looped across his waistcoat. “That man, for instance, looks like he’d pay you a hundred dollars right now.” She turned out her empty pockets—not showing him, of course, the black silk Warlock’s purse that she kept tucked safely in the top of her boot. “Do I look like I have a hundred dollars?”
“No,” he said. “But you look as though you are in need of help. Take the ticket. You will not get another.”
“No, thank you,” Emily said. Never mind that she distrusted Russian accents; she distrusted unexpected largesse even more. She quickly made her way into the crowd, putting a thick buffer of human flesh between her and the stranger. What had his game been? Had he seen through her costume and assumed she was some kind of hussy who catered to odd whims? Or maybe he hadn’t seen through the costume, and thought she was a tender boy who could be bought for the price of passage.
Shocking either way, but never mind. She wasn’t going to let herself become indebted to some strange Russian, potentially unclean expectations or not. She pushed her way to the ticket counter, jostling and being jostled mercilessly.
“Just to Dutch Flat!” she called to the harassed ticketing agent, over the din of dozens of other would-be passengers. “I’ll ride on the cowcatcher if I have to!”
“Not for days,” the harassed ticket agent hollered back. She pleaded with him, told him about her sick father, then added in five starving siblings for good measure. The ticket agent glared at her from underneath his green eyeshade. “Everyone’s got a story, kid. Next!”
Emily pushed her way back through the crowd toward the front of the station where it was cooler, where she could get a breath of air. The 4:45 train was just pulling into the station, all billowing steam and coal cinders and squealing brakes. She considered sneaking over the fence, climbing surreptitiously onto the caboose, but it seemed that other miscreants had had the idea before her; the fence was guarded by dozens of soldiers in Army blue.
Emily sighed, took her hat off, and ran her good hand through her hair. She should have taken the ticket from the Russian, pervert though he may have been. It was her own evil assumptions that had done her in. She hadn’t even considered the third possible explanation for his strange behavior—that he was a perfectly nice man, without an ounce of guile, just trying to be helpful. People helped people in California. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d only been in New York a few weeks, and already she was turning hard and suspicious.
She sat down on the steps, rubbing a flake of ash from her eye. As she sat, something crinkled in her pocket.
She put her hand there and withdrew a train ticket.
She cast a look around herself, half expecting to see the gleam of the brown man’s eyes. Without an ounce of guile indeed. She looked over the ticket for a moment, hardly believing it could be real.
How on earth had he …?
The steam-blast whistle and hoarse shout of “All aboard!” jolted her out of her reverie.
“Damn Russians,” she muttered, jumping to her feet and breaking into a flat run.
Emily stepped off the platform at Dutch Flat just before midnight, footsore and tired. She’d had to stand the entire way, of course. Wearing the costume of a young man always made her feel sorry for young men. They were always having to surrender their seats, help ladies with improbably heavy bags, hold cages full of squabbling chickens, get kicked in the shins by annoying little brats, and suffer torrents of abuse from sour old geezers who were of the opinion that any able-bodied young man who hadn’t stayed behind to protect San Francisco was little more than a lily livered coward, a weakling, a woman.
It was a Wednesday night, so there wasn’t much doing in Dutch Flat. Emily was reassured by the air of calm and quiet that prevailed. There were no soldiers here, no smell of oily smoke, no screams. By all appearances, everyone was safely asleep in bed. Her heart, which had been thumping like a drum ever since she’d left the Institute, settled a bit. If things were normal here in Dutch Flat, then it was that much more likely that everything in Lost Pine was all right, too.
Still, she’d come this far, and she was looking forward to seeing her pap. Her only chance to get up the mountain before daybreak was to rent a horse, and the livery was shut up tight. The Gold Bucket saloon was well lit, though, and after she’d put down money for a couple of shots of monstrous whiskey, the bartender pointed her in the direction of the livery’s proprietor, who was sitting a few stools down. She bought the half-drunk man another couple of glasses of the rotten brew, thus persuading him to provide her with a nag and a saddle, all for the usurious sum of a dollar a day.
Once in the saddle, with the two glasses of monstrous whiskey working to their full effect, Emily felt the fear that had gripped her since her Cassandra in Mrs. Stanton’s parlor recede. The night was beautiful and clear, a full moon lighting her way.
She turned the horse up the familiar trail, through sweet-smelling pines with new tips of bright green. Silence enfolded her. The only sounds she could hear were the night calls of birds and the wind rustling the pine boughs far above, and her own horse’s feet, crunching on old pinecones and occasionally clopping on a piece of weathered granite.
When she came to the Hanging Oak, spread branches gleaming in the moonlight, Emily pulled her horse to a stop. Beneath it, she’d crafted the Ashes of Amour over a month ago. With everything she’d learned since then, she could hardly believe that she could have been so stupid, so ignorantly cruel. She hadn’t been able to remove the love spell she’d put on Dag Hansen—the lumberman she’d hoped to marry for his money—before she left Lost Pine, but she could do it now. She was in a hurry, but the moon was full, and she owed it to Dag. She stripped off her clothes, for such magic had to be performed skyclad. Naked in the sweet summer night air, she knelt before the tree and spoke a very simple incantation.
“Friend, I release you.”
It might not do much good. Dag had said he’d loved her before she put the love spell on him, but she hoped with all her heart that it would help.
“Dag, I’m sorry,” she whispered, wishing she could say it to his face. But she might never see him again, and it was probably better that way. Now that she understood the power of love, she realized how truly horrible her actions had been.
She dressed as quickly as she could, but her missing hand made it an arduous process. Another part of her life that could never be made whole again, only accepted and compensated for. Pushing the uncomfortable association out of her mind, she climbed back onto her horse and rode on.
By the time she got to Pap’s cabin, the sun was rising, drawing a luminous veil of peach and orange over the tops of the tall pines.
The little cabin stood in a wide clearing, with a little crick running behind it, fresh and fast and dark. When she’d left in the spring, only a few tender little plants were peeping shyly up through the dark mud; now everything was a rich riot of tangled green. A few chickens, scrabbling around in the cabin’s front yard, clucked welcomingly to her.
Home sweet home, Emily thought, hitching the nag to a tree. She found that her heart was beating hard again, and she hardly knew why. The cabin’s door was open slightly.
“Pap?” She removed her hat as she called inside. “Pap, it’s me. Emily.”
She had to blink to get her eyes to adjust to the gloom inside. The cabin seemed smaller and closer than she remembered and swelteringly hot as usual, with a huge fire blazing on the hearth. In the light of the fire, she saw a small hunched form, silhouetted in darkness. He was covered in cats, dozens of them, the beloved animals that always surrounded him. They stared at her as she entered, their eyes glowing accusingly.
“Em?” The voice came from the hunched form. Pap’s voice was terrible, choked and broken. “Oh, Em, it’s you! Blessed be … you’ve come back!”